Sourdough Starter Culture San Francisco Style - Homemade Artisan Bread - Fast Activating Sourdough Starter Culture - Dehydrated Live Culture Bread Mix - Easy Instruction Manual- KOSHER - By LA Trevitt

This is an excellent sourdough starter. It's straight forward and easier than starting one's own. It took less than a week to feed it to make bread. I bought this prior to the holidays, because I wanted something different than just dinner rolls. The rolls were a real hit. I decided to make homemade bread for sandwiches while the kids were out of school for their Christmas break. They loved it. I'm going to try just to make bread instead of buy it. The sourdough needs to be fed once a week and half of it needs to be discarded for the process. I've kept the other half in the frig and added to it for a week and then made homemade crackers. This recipe for crackers would probably make a great thin crust for pizza. I've also made Brazilian Pastels. There are 100s of ways to use this starter, even the "discarded" portion of it. The house smells wonderful when I'm baking now. It has a perfect aroma for good French sourdough. The dough is elastic and takes additional flour, butter and water well. The trick with sour dough is using excellent, high quality flour, salt, oil and butter. I used Bob's all purpose, I was told by a French baker, not to used pastry flour with sour dough. Redmond's salt, and if oil, only olive oil. It's important to know that sourdough takes a while to get super sour. I purchased the sourdough starter mid November. The sough dough was in constant use from Nov 20-Jan 10. The rolls for Thanksgiving were good, but I needed to use a bit of LeSaffre Saf to make them a bit more flavorful. Now, the dough is good and sour, the way you would find it in France. If you decided to give the sour dough a rest and not use it for a while, store it in an airlock glass jar. It won't kill the bacteria. Remember to feed it once a week. Give the "discarded" part to a neighbor or start a second batch of sour dough, or make crackers. They're the best crackers in the world.

This dehydrated starter made quick work of getting an active sponge going. Within only a couple days it was already strong and healthy. I found the directions easy to follow. This is a learning process for me and it’s fun to experiment with the fermentation to develop different flavors. Not sure I’m adhering to strict authenticity but I’m seeing good results though using King Arthur bread flour.

Waist off time and waist off money. Please do’t buy

This is a great introduction to sourdough. I would say it doesn’t give a beginner a lot of room and it would be easy to make mistakes by following the directions provided with this starter. The ratio is provided are not going to give you the product you want, but as long as you know that you can adjust using the starter. Note that I purchased both and fed them side-by-side for one week before using, and then continued to feed them for a week while using. The San Francisco sourdough started strong but failed daily whereas the French started slowly, but was so consistent every single day that I threw away the San Francisco.

Work says it should

Great start to my sourdough journey. Easy to follow directions and a my starter is still going strong.

Sourdough Starter Culture San Francisco Style is not sour enough for me. I didn't have too much trouble getting the starter to proof and it makes good bread, it simply isn't sour enough. It did die with careful tending without putting it in the fridge.

We just started making our own sourdough and choose this starter. We followed the directions and it worked just like it should.